Posts tagged ‘Gen V’

Web 3.0? What’s that now? We’re still dealing with Web 2.0 and now I’m already talking about Web 3.0?! Well, if you’ve been reading my earlier posts, in essence, I’ve already talked about Web 3.0 – the Semantic Web. So I won’t go into the details of that in this post. My focus for this post is where I think Web 3.0 is heading and what one of the trends in that space will be and what it means for marketing agencies in the future.

As the concepts around Web 3.0 become more and more of a reality, one of the trends is going to be the semantic user experience. What I mean by this is how we can explore the notion of adding artificial intelligence and context around the user experience to make it a much more compelling and customized activity for each user. Any marketing person worth their salt knows that in this day and age, you should be devising your marketing around creating an exceptional user experience. The semantic web will take this to a new level. As we gain more context around data that a user wants to work with and parlay that into the user experience, we need to remember that context will be king. Mobility, audio, video and presence will the new desktop. Users will move from becoming consumers to prosumers – they will be the ones controlling the content – creating it, adding to it, enriching it, sharing it with their peers.

So what does the virtual generation (or Gen V as Gartner calls it) mean? It means a new generation that is tech savvy and carries out most of their networking and interactions via the digital medium. A generation that is immersed in virtual worlds and their identity in this world is their virtual avatar. Marketing folks will need to shift their thinking from collecting demographics information to collecting information that these avatars leave behind because the avatars will grow personalities and the user’s likes and dislikes will be reflected in their avatars. What does this mean for product companies? Think about how to allow Gen V to explore your product in virtual worlds. The semantic web will lead to augmented reality – th ability to mix real world and computer based data to arrive at decisions. That will become more of a reality once cloud computing and associated technologies such as virtualization become more and more mainstream, resulting in optimal use of bandwidth, machine computing power, expanded reasoning and dynamic visualization to create a semantically rich user application to serve the next generation – Generation V.